When hiring, should you prioritize candidates who fit your culture, or those with the strongest technical skills?
Experts
Skills can be taught, but values alignment can't. Hire people who share your company's values, work style, and mission orientation. A toxic high-performer destroys more value than they create.
Hire the most talented people you can find. A-players attract A-players. Skills and raw ability are harder to develop than cultural adaptation.
Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, TripAdvisor)
I like to say culture add, because culture fit to me can actually be quite negative toward somebody who is the aberration. You have to fit in. Especially if this is a demographic thing, a person of color, a gay person, a person in a wheelchair, so you have to fit in.
Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe)
It turns out product market fit is just the product, and that is not a company, and that will not scale, to point.
That's right, they haven't. The book has an exercise that I recommend in it that's a little bit more about crystallizing your personal values, but that's kind of the place you want to start. And it's essentially there's a whole menu, and you can find these online, of say 70 or 80 different values. And by values, I mean family, ambition, impact competition.
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
Absolutely. What I particularly love, so a lot of my product thinking and my product chops and craft, I really owe to Uber. So when I think about things, there's something really magical there. And one of our values at the time was making magic. So I met the word magic all the time, but so mission, push a button, get a ride, transportation as reliable as running water.
So I always say, "What are the good behaviors that you reward and the bad behaviors that you condone?" And if you're not going back to revisit that, then the culture just moves on and then the company's out playing catch-up or it moves on in the way you don't want it to. And then the world is like, "Oh my god, Uber. Delete Uber," which actually happened. I lived it.
How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
And that, I think, was quite cultural. There was this humongous respect and enthusiasm for thinking. It was such a part of the culture. One of the values was, think rigorously. Every meeting was very much like, "Hey, how do we think about this thing from first principle?
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
So, I think that's a really cool framework when you're trying to get people to adopt something, is think about what do they actually need? And then how do you convince them of the things that are just in their head? And it sounds like the win there was kind of this sharing your mission and your values as a business.
Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group)
What else are important cultural values of TikTok, of how TikTok operates that everyone always has in mind when they're building?
Essentially what you look for when you're hiring people is making sure they're always curious, they have high discipline, and that they prioritize well. Coming back to the cultural pieces of TikTok, so the main one you've shared so far is this idea of context, not control.
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Yeah, I think it's basically practicing feedback in a very open and constructive way and focusing on what is important for the business and not shying away from having some of those observations and conversations, not shying away from them.
Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook)
First is the rest of the company needs to see what you're doing as being core and critical to the mission. It can't seem like these guys are just playing off in a corner on something that isn't related to what we are doing every day.
How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO)
We can't really have any of the other aspects of the culture, including candor, learning, seeking excellence in improvement, freedom and responsibility if you don't start with high talent density. And in some ways, it's very reflective of Reed Hastings as founder of Netflix.
It feels to me there's these three important elements, and maybe there's more. One is very high talent density and a focus on high performers. Two is candor and being really direct. And then three is giving people freedom and responsibility and getting rid of useless processes like vacation time and things like that.
Are your fears giving you terrible advice? | Matt Mochary
Then I thought, oh no, I've got to go into my team and let someone go, and here's the problem. We've already done talent density, we've already done the Netflix thing. If someone is meeting expectation, we let them go. We've already let all those folks go. So on our team, it's only outperformers.
How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)
That's a good way of putting it. Something else that when people hear this, people sometimes hear companies like yours saying, "Okay, we're going to be bottoms up. We're going to try a bunch of stuff. We're not going to have exactly a plan of where it's going in the next few months." The key is you all hire the best people in the world.
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody
If you are very patient, there's always some trade-off between speed and quality when hiring. And I remember especially for our first 10 people, we were just so patient and disciplined about finding some of the best people in the world. Half of them are...
Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
And also because your team's small, we have this internal Notion called talent density. We don't try to track number of people but we try to track how talent-dense, revenue per employee we are. And people want to work with either more talented people. So it's a positive company group.
Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)
And I really like this, it's pretty simple, but it's a good reminder that, as a leader, one of the things that you are of course driving towards is trying to get better performance so that your team feels more purpose and motivation and is excited about their work and that you're building greater things for your customers and you're having more business effect, and, of course, ...
Inside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company’s code this year | Scott Wu
Wow, those are incredible stories. And it makes so real these, as you say, cliches, hire the best people, this is what it sounds like to hire the best people. This is what it takes.
And then just going back to your three to five things. So, essentially this is incredible advice, essentially, it's like you always hear hire the best people, move fast, build things people want.
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD)
And I think the third thing is unfortunately when you're working to build a high talent bar and high talent density, then when folks aren't a fit and it's not working, moving against that quickly is part of the job.
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We reframed 'culture fit' to 'culture add' — looking for people who bring something new while sharing our core values. Game changer for diversity.